DIANE RAVITCH DEFENDS COMPREHENSIVE HIGH SCHOOLS

The NY Times has a piece on music programs being done away with as big high schools are turned into a number of small high schools. Diane Ravitch picked up on it and hammered it beautifully.

Thank you Diane for mentioning Jamaica High School in her post.

Here are some of the main parts:
Today(Monday), the New York Times observed (too late to matter, too late to save Jamaica High Schoool in Queens or Christpher Columbus in the Bronx) that the Bloomberg-Klein decision to close large high schools and replace them with small schools has effectively destroyed successful music programs. The compensation is supposed to be that the graduation rate is higher in the small schools. But as I reported in my book, “The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education,” the small schools enroll different students from the large schools they replaced. The neediest students are shuffled off elsewhere. 

The Times gives an incomplete picture:
Between 2002 and 2013, New York City closed 69 high schools, most of them large schools with thousands of students, and in their place opened new, smaller schools. Academically, these new schools inarguably serve students better. In 2009, the year before the city began closing Columbus, the school had a graduation rate of 37 percent. In 2017, the five small schools that occupy its former campus had a cumulative graduation rate of 81 percent.

This sounds real good but it doesn't tell the whole story. Diane just takes the article's claims apart piece by piece:

The students with cognitive disabilities are not in the new small schools. The English language learners, the newcomers who speak no English, are gone.

Schools that once enrolled 4,000 students now house five schools, each with an enrollment of 500 or less. Do the math. When you disappear 1500 of 4,000 students, it does wonders for your graduation rate!

You can deduce this from the article, but it is never spelled out plainly. The small schools are not enrolling the same students as the so-called “failing high schools” of 4,000. The subhead of the article reads: “Downside of Replacing City’s Big Failing Schools.” I suggest that the big high schools were not “failing.” They were enrolling every student who arrived at their door, without regard to language or disability.

This is not success. This is a deliberate culling of students that involves collateral damage, not only the shuffling off of the neediest students, but the deliberate killing of the arts, advanced classes, sports, and the very concept of comprehensive high school, all to be able to boast about higher graduation rates for those who survived. A PR trick.

Add in the grade inflation and sometimes academic fraud in many new small schools and you kind of have the whole story about how the small school miracle is basically fiction.